WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

Introduction. Wireless sensor network (WSN) refers to a group of spatially dispersed

and dedicated sensors for monitoring and recording the physical conditions of the
environment and organizing the collected data at a central location. WSNs measure
environmental conditions like temperature, sound, pollution levels, humidity, wind, and so
on.
These are similar to wireless ad hoc networks in the sense that they rely on wireless
connectivity and spontaneous formation of networks so that sensor data can be
transported wirelessly. WSNs are spatially
distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such
as temperature, sound, pressure, etc. and to cooperatively pass their data through the
network to a main location. The more modern networks are bi-directional, also
enabling control of sensor activity. The development of wireless sensor networks was
motivated by military applications such as battlefield surveillance; today such networks
are used in many industrial and consumer applications, such as industrial process
monitoring and control, machine health monitoring, and so on.
The WSN is built of "nodes" – from a few to several hundreds or even thousands, where
each node is connected to one (or sometimes several) sensors. Each such sensor
network node has typically several parts: a radio transceiver with an internal antenna or
connection to an external antenna, a microcontroller, an electronic circuit for interfacing
with the sensors and an energy source, usually a battery or an embedded form of energy
harvesting. A sensor node might vary in size from that of a shoebox down to the size of
a grain of dust, although functioning "motes" of genuine microscopic dimensions have yet
to be created. The cost of sensor nodes is similarly variable, ranging from a few to
hundreds of dollars, depending on the complexity of the individual sensor nodes. Size
and cost constraints on sensor nodes result in corresponding constraints on resources
such as energy, memory, computational speed and communications bandwidth. The
topology of the WSNs can vary from a simple star network to an advanced multi-
hop wireless mesh network. The propagation technique between the hops of the network
can be routing or flooding.
In computer science and telecommunications, wireless sensor networks are an active
research area with numerous workshops and conferences arranged each year, for
example IPSN, Sen Sys, and EWSN.
Typical Structure of WSN

APPLICATIONS
Area monitoring
Area monitoring is a common application of WSNs. In area monitoring, the WSN is
deployed over a region where some phenomenon is to be monitored. A military example
is the use of sensors to detect enemy intrusion; a civilian example is the geo-fencing of
gas or oil pipelines.
Health care monitoring
There are several types of sensor networks for medical applications: implanted, wearable,
and environment-embedded. Implantable medical devices are those that are inserted
inside the human body. Wearable devices are used on the body surface of a human or
just at close proximity of the user. Environment-embedded systems employ sensors
contained in the environment. Possible applications include body position measurement,
location of persons, overall monitoring of ill patients in hospitals and at home. Devices
embedded in the environment track the physical state of a person for continuous health
diagnosis, using as input the data from a network of depth cameras, a sensing floor, or
other similar devices. Body-area networks can collect information about an individual's
health, fitness, and energy expenditure. In health care applications the privacy and
authenticity of user data has prime importance. Especially due to the integration of sensor
networks, with IoT, the user authentication becomes more challenging; however, a
solution is presented in recent work.

Environmental/Earth sensing
There are many applications in monitoring environmental parameters, examples of which
are given below. They share the extra challenges of harsh environments and reduced
power supply.
Air pollution monitoring
Wireless sensor networks have been deployed in several cities (Stockholm, London,
and Brisbane) to monitor the concentration of dangerous gases for citizens. These can
take advantage of the ad hoc wireless links rather than wired installations, which also
make them more mobile for testing readings in different areas.
Forest fire detection
A network of Sensor Nodes can be installed in a forest to detect when a fire has started.
The nodes can be equipped with sensors to measure temperature, humidity and gases
which are produced by fire in the trees or vegetation. The early detection is crucial for a
successful action of the firefighters; thanks to Wireless Sensor Networks, the fire brigade
will be able to know when a fire is started and how it is spreading.

Landslide detection
A landslide detection system makes use of a wireless sensor network to detect the slight
movements of soil and changes in various parameters that may occur before or during a
landslide. Through the data gathered it may be possible to know the impending
occurrence of landslides long before it actually happens.
Water quality monitoring
Water quality monitoring involves analyzing water properties in dams, rivers, lakes and
oceans, as well as underground water reserves. The use of many wireless distributed
sensors enables the creation of a more accurate map of the water status, and allows the
permanent deployment of monitoring stations in locations of difficult access, without the
need of manual data retrieval.
Natural disaster prevention
Wireless sensor networks can be effective in preventing adverse consequences of natural
disasters, like floods. Wireless nodes have been deployed successfully in rivers, where
changes in water levels must be monitored in real time.

Industrial monitoring
Machine health monitoring
Wireless sensor networks have been developed for machinery condition-based
maintenance (CBM) as they offer significant cost savings and enable new functionality.
Wireless sensors can be placed in locations difficult or impossible to reach with a wired
system, such as rotating machinery and untethered vehicles.
Data logging
Wireless sensor networks also are used for the collection of data for monitoring of
environmental information. This can be as simple as monitoring the temperature in a
fridge or the level of water in overflow tanks in nuclear power plants. The statistical
information can then be used to show how systems have been working. The advantage
of WSNs over conventional loggers is the "live" data feed that is possible.
Water/waste water monitoring
Monitoring the quality and level of water includes many activities such as checking the
quality of underground or surface water and ensuring a country’s water infrastructure for
the benefit of both human and animal. It may be used to protect the wastage of water.
Structural health monitoring
Wireless sensor networks can be used to monitor the condition of civil infrastructure and
related geo-physical processes close to real time, and over long periods through data
logging, using appropriately interfaced sensors.
Wine production
Wireless sensor networks are used to monitor wine production, both in the field and the
cellar.
Threat detection
The Wide Area Tracking System (WATS) is a prototype network for detecting a ground-
based nuclear device such as a nuclear "briefcase bomb." WATS is being developed at
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). WATS would be made up of
wireless gamma and neutron sensors connected through a communications network.
Data picked up by the sensors undergoes "data fusion", which converts the information
into easily interpreted forms; this data fusion is the most important aspect of the system.
The data fusion process occurs within the sensor network rather than at a centralized
computer and is performed by a specially developed algorithm based on Bayesian
statistics. WATS would not use a centralized computer for analysis because researchers
found that factors such as latency and available bandwidth tended to create significant
bottlenecks. Data processed in the field by the network itself (by transferring small
amounts of data between neighboring sensors) is faster and makes the network more
scalable.
An important factor in WATS development is ease of deployment, since more sensors
both improves the detection rate and reduces false alarms. WATS sensors could be
deployed in permanent positions or mounted in vehicles for mobile protection of specific
locations. One barrier to the implementation of WATS is the size, weight, energy
requirements and cost of currently available wireless sensors. The development of
improved sensors is a major component of current research at the Nonproliferation, Arms
Control, and International Security (NAI) Directorate at LLNL.
WATS was profiled to the U.S. House of Representatives' Military Research and
Development Subcommittee on October 1, 1997 during a hearing on nuclear terrorism
and countermeasures. On August 4, 1998 in a subsequent meeting of that subcommittee,
Chairman Curt Weldon stated that research funding for WATS had been cut by
the Clinton administration to a subsistence level and that the program had been poorly
re-organized.
 CHARACTERISTICS
The main characteristics of a WSN include
 Power consumption constraints for nodes using batteries or energy harvesting.
Examples of suppliers are ReVibe Energy and Perpetuum
 Ability to cope with node failures (resilience)
 Some mobility of nodes (for highly mobile nodes see MWSNs)
 Heterogeneity of nodes
 Homogeneity of nodes
 Scalability to large scale of deployment
 Ability to withstand harsh environmental conditions
 Ease of use
 Cross-layer design
Cross-layer is becoming an important studying area for wireless communications. In
addition, the traditional layered approach presents three main problems:
1. Traditional layered approach cannot share different information among different
layers, which leads to each layer not having complete information. The traditional
layered approach cannot guarantee the optimization of the entire network.
2. The traditional layered approach does not have the ability to adapt to the
environmental change.
3. Because of the interference between the different users, access conflicts, fading,
and the change of environment in the wireless sensor networks, traditional layered
approach for wired networks is not applicable to wireless networks.
So the cross-layer can be used to make the optimal modulation to improve the
transmission performance, such as data rate, energy efficiency, QoS (Quality of Service),
etc. Sensor nodes can be imagined as small computers which are extremely basic in
terms of their interfaces and their components. They usually consist of a processing
unit with limited computational power and limited memory, sensors or MEMS (including
specific conditioning circuitry), a communication device (usually radio transceivers or
alternatively optical), and a power source usually in the form of a battery. Other possible
inclusions are energy harvesting modules, secondary ASICs, and possibly secondary
communication interface (e.g. RS-232 or USB).
The base stations are one or more components of the WSN with much more
computational, energy and communication resources. They act as a gateway between
sensor nodes and the end user as they typically forward data from the WSN on to a
server. Other special components in routing based networks are routers, designed to
compute, calculate and distribute the routing tables.

PLATFORMS
Hardware
One major challenge in a WSN is to produce low cost and tiny sensor nodes. There are
an increasing number of small companies producing WSN hardware and the commercial
situation can be compared to home computing in the 1970s. Many of the nodes are still
in the research and development stage, particularly their software. Also inherent to sensor
network adoption is the use of very low power methods for radio communication and data
acquisition.
In many applications, a WSN communicates with a Local Area Network or Wide Area
Network through a gateway. The Gateway acts as a bridge between the WSN and the
other network. This enables data to be stored and processed by devices with more
resources, for example, in a remotely located server. A wireless wide area network used
primarily for low-power devices is known as a Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN).
Wireless
There are several wireless standards and solutions for sensor node
connectivity. Thread and ZigBee can connect sensors operating at 2.4 GHz with a data
rate of 250kbit/s. Many use a lower frequency to increase radio range (typically 1 km), for
example Z-wave operates at 915 MHz and in the EU 868 MHz has been widely used but
these have a lower data rate (typically 50 kb/s). The IEEE 802.15.4 working group
provides a standard for low power device connectivity and commonly sensors and smart
meters use one of these standards for connectivity. With the emergence of Internet of
Things, many other proposals have been made to provide sensor connectivity. LORA is
a form of LPWAN which provides long range low power wireless connectivity for devices,
which has been used in smart meters. Wi-SUN connects devices at home. Narrow Band
IOT and LTE-M can connect up to millions of sensors and devices using cellular
technology.
Software
Energy is the scarcest resource of WSN nodes, and it determines the lifetime of WSNs.
WSNs may be deployed in large numbers in various environments, including remote and
hostile regions, where ad hoc communications are a key component. For this reason,
algorithms and protocols need to address the following issues:
 Increased lifespan
 Robustness and fault tolerance
 Self-configuration
Lifetime maximization: Energy/Power Consumption of the sensing device should be
minimized and sensor nodes should be energy efficient since their limited energy
resource determines their lifetime. To conserve power, wireless sensor nodes normally
power off both the radio transmitter and the radio receiver when not in use.
Routing Protocols
Wireless sensor networks are composed of low-energy, small-size, and low-range
unattended sensor nodes. Recently, it has been observed that by periodically turning on
and off the sensing and communication capabilities of sensor nodes, we can significantly
reduce the active time and thus prolong network lifetime. However, this duty cycling may
result in high network latency, routing overhead, and neighbor discovery delays due to
asynchronous sleep and wake-up scheduling. These limitations call for a countermeasure
for duty-cycled wireless sensor networks which should minimize routing information,
routing traffic load, and energy consumption. Researchers from Sungkyunkwan
University have proposed a lightweight non-increasing delivery-latency interval routing
referred as LNDIR. This scheme can discover minimum latency routes at each non-
increasing delivery-latency interval instead of each time slot. Simulation experiments
demonstrated the validity of this novel approach in minimizing routing information stored
at each sensor. Furthermore, this novel routing can also guarantee the minimum delivery
latency from each source to the sink. Performance improvements of up to 12-fold and 11-
fold are observed in terms of routing traffic load reduction and energy efficiency,
respectively, as compared to existing schemes.
Operating systems
Operating systems for wireless sensor network nodes are typically less complex than
general-purpose operating systems. They more strongly resemble embedded systems,
for two reasons. First, wireless sensor networks are typically deployed with a particular
application in mind, rather than as a general platform. Second, a need for low costs and
low power leads most wireless sensor nodes to have low-power microcontrollers ensuring
that mechanisms such as virtual memory are either unnecessary or too expensive to
implement.
It is therefore possible to use embedded operating systems such as eCos or uC/OS for
sensor networks. However, such operating systems are often designed with real-time
properties.
Tiny OS is perhaps the first operating system specifically designed for wireless sensor
networks. Tiny OS is based on an event-driven programming model instead
of multithreading. Tiny OS programs are composed of event handlers and tasks with run-
to-completion semantics. When an external event occurs, such as an incoming data
packet or a sensor reading, Tiny OS signals the appropriate event handler to handle the
event. Event handlers can post tasks that are scheduled by the Tiny OS kernel some time
later.
LiteOS is a newly developed OS for wireless sensor networks, which provides UNIX-like
abstraction and support for the C programming language.
Contiki is an OS which uses a simpler programming style in C while providing advances
such as 6LoWPAN and Protothreads.
RIOT (operating system) is a more recent real-time OS including similar functionality to
Contiki.
PreonVM is an OS for wireless sensor networks, which provides 6LoWPAN based
on Contiki and support for the Java programming language.
Online collaborative sensor data management platforms
Online collaborative sensor data management platforms are on-line database services
that allow sensor owners to register and connect their devices to feed data into an online
database for storage and also allow developers to connect to the database and build their
own applications based on that data. Examples include Xively and the Wikisensing
platform. Such platforms simplify online collaboration between users over diverse data
sets ranging from energy and environment data to that collected from transport services.
Other services include allowing developers to embed real-time graphs & widgets in
websites; analyse and process historical data pulled from the data feeds; send real-time
alerts from any datastream to control scripts, devices and environments.
The architecture of the Wikisensing system describes the key components of such
systems to include APIs and interfaces for online collaborators, a middleware containing
the business logic needed for the sensor data management and processing and a storage
model suitable for the efficient storage and retrieval of large volumes of data.
Simulation
At present, agent-based modeling and simulation is the only paradigm which allows the
simulation of complex behavior in the environments of wireless sensors (such as
flocking). Agent-based simulation of wireless sensor and ad hoc networks is a relatively
new paradigm. Agent-based modelling was originally based on social simulation.
Network simulators like Opnet, Tetcos NetSim and NS can be used to simulate a wireless
sensor network.
 OTHER CONCEPTS
Security
Infrastructure-less architecture (i.e. no gateways are included, etc.) and inherent
requirements (i.e. unattended working environment, etc.) of WSNs might pose several
weak points that attract adversaries. Therefore, security is a big concern when WSNs are
deployed for special applications such as military and healthcare. Owing to their unique
characteristics, traditional security methods of computer networks would be useless (or
less effective) for WSNs. Hence, lack of security mechanisms would cause intrusions
towards those networks. These intrusions need to be detected and mitigation methods
should be applied.
Distributed sensor network
If a centralized architecture is used in a sensor network and the central node fails, then
the entire network will collapse, however the reliability of the sensor network can be
increased by using a distributed control architecture. Distributed control is used in WSNs
for the following reasons:
1. Sensor nodes are prone to failure,
2. For better collection of data,
3. To provide nodes with backup in case of failure of the central node.
There is also no centralized body to allocate the resources and they have to be self-
organized.
Data integration and sensor web
The data gathered from wireless sensor networks is usually saved in the form of numerical
data in a central base station. Additionally, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is
specifying standards for interoperability interfaces and metadata encodings that enable
real time integration of heterogeneous sensor webs into the Internet, allowing any
individual to monitor or control wireless sensor networks through a web browser.
In-network processing
To reduce communication costs some algorithms remove or reduce nodes' redundant
sensor information and avoid forwarding data that is of no use. This technique has been
used, for instance, for distributed anomaly detection or distributed optimization. As nodes
can inspect the data they forward, they can measure averages or directionality for
example of readings from other nodes. For example, in sensing and monitoring
applications, it is generally the case that neighboring sensor nodes monitoring an
environmental feature typically register similar values. This kind of data redundancy due
to the spatial correlation between sensor observations inspires techniques for in-network
data aggregation and mining. Aggregation reduces the amount of network traffic which
helps to reduce energy consumption on sensor nodes. Recently, it has been found that
network gateways also play an important role in improving energy efficiency of sensor
nodes by scheduling more resources for the nodes with more critical energy efficiency
need and advanced energy efficient scheduling algorithms need to be implemented at
network gateways for the improvement of the overall network energy efficiency.
Secure data aggregation
This is a form of in-network processing where sensor nodes are assumed to be
unsecured with limited available energy, while the base station is assumed to be secure
with unlimited available energy. Aggregation complicates the already existing security
challenges for wireless sensor networks and requires new security techniques tailored
specifically for this scenario. Providing security to aggregate data in wireless sensor
networks is known as secure data aggregation in WSN. were the first few works
discussing techniques for secure data aggregation in wireless sensor networks.
Two main security challenges in secure data aggregation are confidentiality and integrity
of data. While encryption is traditionally used to provide end to end confidentiality in
wireless sensor network, the aggregators in a secure data aggregation scenario need to
decrypt the encrypted data to perform aggregation. This exposes the plaintext at the
aggregators, making the data vulnerable to attacks from an adversary. Similarly an
aggregator can inject false data into the aggregate and make the base station accept
false data. Thus, while data aggregation improves energy efficiency of a network, it
complicates the existing security challenges.